Chapter 22
Amelia
Amelia sobbed as the prisoners were freed, recognising some of their faces from the guild. The further they were from the rift, the safer they would be. Casyl arranged for part of the army to escort them in case any more of the creatures arrived. The humans wouldn’t stand a chance alone.
She hoped that their neighbours in Alderstrom would provide them with refuge.
“You can go with them,” Casyl said quietly. “You could lead them to safety.”
She spun to face him. Her eyes searched his face. He was giving her the option to leave, allowing her to choose.
“Is that what you want?”
His expression tightened. “No, but it needs to be your choice.”
“Then I’m staying until this is over.”
A chasm had formed in the ground before the city where the Leshies had been buried. The earth had caved in, collapsing into the catacombs beneath the surface. They writhed and shrieked in their stone prison as they fought to escape.
It would contain them for now, but it wasn’t a permanent solution. They needed to find a way to close the rift to stop any more from coming through.
“What happens after?” he asked. “Do we go back home?”
“Home?” she asked.
She hadn’t really considered it.
Everything she’d known—her home, her work, her friends—was gone. There was nothing keeping her here, but could she commit to a life in their world? If she went, it was unlikely that she’d be able to return if opening the rift caused this much trouble.
“I don’t know,” she said.
They stood together and watched from the city walls as a small portion of their army escorted the humans to safety.
Those people had lost everything, but at least they were alive. So many were now dead.
“We need to close the rift. Do you think I could just close it?” she asked.
“No, you don’t have the power to close a rift. The only reason you could open it was because of your ability to void magic. The veil must have been weak at the point where you entered our world. I wonder if anything else came through.”
The thought jolted her. She hadn’t considered that. Could someone else have stumbled into their world before her?
“I have no idea who would be powerful enough to do such a thing, but to close the rift, it would take someone with great magic.”
Casyl called for another meeting.
They gathered in the palace’s boardroom around the table at which Amelia had sat so many times before. She almost missed the boredom of the palace meetings.
“What if we block the rift with something?” Elthar suggested. “We could build a barrier in front of it.”
“It could work temporarily, but it would have to be a pretty strong wall to keep the beasts out, plus those humans could come with their explosives and bomb it,” Ruven said. “Then they could invade our world!”
Amelia smiled at the thought. Once the humans saw the creatures that lived in the fae world, they’d quickly turn around.
“Where’s Salkin?” Tharos asked.
They looked around the room and saw that he was missing.
“I’ll look for him,” Ruven offered.
She wandered out of the room into the palace gardens. Casyl’s gaze followed her as she left.
Ruven came running towards her.
“Did you find him?” she called.
“No, worse,” he said. “I think he left with the army escorting the humans. You tell Casyl and I’ll send a scout to follow him. They can’t have gone very far yet.”
Amelia ran back into the palace and found Casyl where she’d left him, strategising with the generals.
He looked up as she entered, frowning at her distress.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Ruven couldn’t find him. He thinks that Salkin may have left with the army escorting the humans. He’s sending a scout to find out.”
Casyl and Tharos looked at each other.
“Do you think he’s going to harm them?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but I don’t think that would be his main reason to leave with them,” Casyl said.
“What would be his reason for leaving with them?” she asked, confused. If he would not kill them, perhaps he wanted to follow them and take the next city as his own?
“If I were him and I wanted to continue with my father’s plan, I’d escort the humans as an excuse to leave and then detour towards the mine.”
“He still wants the chrysonium?” she asked.
“Most of our people have been without powers for centuries. Some feel as though they’ve been robbed of what is rightfully theirs.
If I’m right and that’s their plan, then they’ll be close to the mine by the time the scout returns.
Tharos, go and slow them down, follow them, buy us some time to ready the army to march to the mine.
If we can get there before them, then we can stop them. ”
They readied the army and waited for the scout’s return. If he confirmed Casyl’s suspicions that Salkin had left to seize the chrysonium, they could depart immediately.
It would have been a good plan. They could have reached the mine and travelled back to the rift with it before anyone knew.
“Are there guards at the mine?” Amelia asked Casyl as they anxiously awaited the scouts’ return.
“Yes, but they’re our men. They wouldn’t question a general like Salkin. They would assume he’d been sent on orders.”
“What will you do to them?” she asked him. Casyl was as imposing as he was dangerous. He dwarfed even the tallest of fae, his muscles rippling, but it was his power that most people feared, and now that his father was gone, he had more power. If they’d defied him, they must have been desperate.
“I don’t know. We’re already fighting too many battles for us to start fighting each other.”
The scout returned with news that the human prisoners were alone, with no escort. He’d followed the tracks of the escorting army and found them heading south-east. He was going to join them until he’d seen Tharos, who’d ordered him to report back as quickly as possible.
Within minutes, the army was ready to leave. They took only the cavalry, allowing them to travel faster.
As they approached the mine, they could see no sign of Salkin and his men. The escorting force comprised one hundred warriors. They would have been visible or left obvious tracks if they’d arrived before them.
“Where are the guards?” Casyl asked, dismounting.
She followed him into the mine cautiously, and the ground began to tremble beneath her feet, reminding her that she’d nearly died there twice. She looked to Casyl to see if he was thinking the same thing and found his eyes on her.
“Are you alright?” he asked. The rippling blue of his irises echoed the mineral veins, pulsing with light.
What was making the crystal glow like that?
She nodded. As long as they weren’t in there too long. The memories and the darkness exacerbated her claustrophobia.
Their path was lit by chrysonium sconces once used to guide the workers. Elthar and Eleandor observed them as they made their way down the tunnels.
The deeper they went, the more bodies they encountered.
Miners who’d been left to die now joined the skeletal remains that were scattered throughout the tunnels.
She covered her mouth with her arm. The stench of decay tinged the air.
They came to one of the large cave chambers where the chrysonium’s iridescent blue streaks glistened in the rock.
Elthar drifted over to the wall and placed his fingers against it, tracing the blue streaks as they glowed brighter. He was transfixed.
“Elthar,” Casyl called to him. He didn’t reply.
Casyl stilled, staring at Elthar.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“It’s the Lifesource,” a voice from behind her said. Eleandor had walked over to them. “Like calls to like,” Eleandor called more loudly. This time Elthar turned towards him. “Look.” He pointed towards the piles of skeletal remains in the cave.
“I hadn’t even noticed them,” Elthar said. “The Lifesource… it called to me. Who were they?”
“They’re ancient remains,” Amelia said.
Their eyes followed her every move as she rummaged through the pile of skeletons to find a horned skull.
A strangled noise escaped Elthar’s mouth.
“These are fae,” he said. “God-cursed.” He looked at Casyl.
Eleandor was slowly nodding to himself as if all of this made sense.
She rose, holding the skull, and turned to Eleandor, presenting it to him.
The Wise One drew a sharp breath and reached for it, as though it were a great gift.
The moment the skull reached his hands, he threw his head back and sank to his knees.
His eyes rolled back, exposing the whites. A wordless cry escaped his mouth.
Amelia watched in horror as no one moved.
“Should we do something?” she whispered to Casyl.
He absently shook his head, eyes never leaving Eleandor.
The air buzzed with energy that emanated from the sage as he went into a trance. His knuckles whitened as he clutched the skull. The mineral veins around them lit up, flickering until their glow became blinding.
Suddenly Eleandor slumped forward and threw out his hands to catch himself. The skull fell from his grasp and rolled onto the floor of the cave. She cringed as the sound of bone hitting rock echoed.
His eyes returned to normal but remained wide as the colour drained from his face. “It cannot be,” he whispered, his brows knitting together as he looked down at the skull.
“What do you see?” Elthar asked.
“What happened to the bodies?” Casyl knelt beside him.
“I see humans and fae together… fighting. Humans with the crystal…fae killing fae.”
“You can see that?” Amelia asked.
“Some things still hold memory… if you know how to listen. I only see fragments—it is often left to me to interpret them. Some of these memories are older than me.” He glanced at Casyl, his attention settling on the antlers curving from his head.
“We were supposed to be guardians of this world, to protect it. These mines were ours, not theirs. It was our greed for power.”
The mystery of the ancient civilisation had plagued her. Were the bodies in the mine victims of the weapon that the humans had created?
“We wanted your power,” Amelia said. “It makes sense, and when it didn’t work the same for us… we found another use for it.”
He nodded, his jaw clenched.
“Then why don’t we remember it?” she asked. “There’s nothing recorded in our history that mentions this.”
“This happened thousands of years ago, before your kingdoms and most of your written histories,” Eleandor said.
“Even fae memories fade, and few of us live long enough to remember that age. Whatever records survived were lost, buried or deliberately forgotten. I see death. Our death. We don’t belong in this world anymore. ”
Silence filled the cavern.
“This world no longer recognises us as part of it,” the sage said.
His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “And yet…” Eleandor whispered. His gaze drifted to Amelia.
“The prophecy… Tiryn believed it, despite dismissing most of the holy lore.”
“What prophecy?” Casyl spat. Amelia knew his thoughts on the priests and religion.
“A foretelling that someone would come, a person who would unite us, a descendant of both bloodlines.”
“Both bloodlines?” she asked.
“We have always believed it meant fae and God-cursed,” Elthar said immediately.
“Prophecies are rarely generous enough to explain themselves.”
Amelia frowned.
The Wise One studied her for a moment too long.
“Unite us how?” Casyl asked.
“Tiryn interpreted it to mean unite us with this world, our ancestral lands.”
“No,” Elthar said, shaking his head. “It meant unite us. Our people have been divided too long over this. We don’t even know how our ancestors reached our lands.”
“What if the survivors escaped through a fracture?” Amelia asked. “The same way I entered your world. That would explain why the fae vanished from ours without leaving any record of where they went.”
They stared at her.
“Perhaps…” Eleandor murmured.
“We need to seal the mine. Humans need protecting from themselves,” Elthar said.
Footsteps echoed in the mine.
Amelia made a strangled noise, and they all turned to look at her.
She swallowed as the cold edge of a sword bit into her skin. If she moved, he would spill her blood.
“I can’t let you do that,” Salkin said. His sickly-sweet breath was hot against her ear.
“None of you understand what it is like to be deprived of your birthright. Now, I’m going to take as much of the Lifesource as I can carry and leave.
If you try to stop me, I’ll slit her throat. She is human after all.”
“We already failed once; the gods won’t forget. Do not continue what your ancestors started,” Eleandor said.
“I don’t believe in your gods,” Salkin replied vehemently.
Amelia looked at Casyl. This might be the last time she saw him. His expression burned with a cold fury.
“Do it,” she said.